Time or Something Like It
by riotcow
Summary: Amy accidentally discovers the depths of the Doctor's feelings for her, which leads to skirting and finally crossing lines. Rory discovers this, and his reactions are somewhat… surprising. Lots of sex and some violence, including some definite slashiness.


_A/N: This is set in a strange netherworld after season 5 and AU to season 6. River sort of just… doesn't exist. I absolutely, madly adore River, but she does get in the way of a good 11/Amy/Rory fic._

* * *

For a long time, he thought of the day on Belarus as the day when everything changed between them.

"_You listen to them every night - her cries echo down the corridors of the TARDIS to you, with your exquisite senses - and you covet her, don't you, Doctor? You hope, desperately, that they don't know that it's destroying you to watch a better man loving her the way you can't. But you cannot hide it from us. We know what your hearts want, Time Lord, and her name is Amelia Pond."_

The words echoed in his ears.

He imagined that they were echoing in hers as well.

As usual, in spite of his mounting panic, he'd managed to do a Thing, and he and his Ponds had once again walked away from death, dismemberment, torture. Except that with less than a hundred words, he feared that the New Pharaoh of Belarus IX had done more damage than even the Doctor could outrun.

And damn all unscrupulous psychics to hell anyway.

Amy had said nothing of it since their escape, but he'd seen her face as his hearts were stripped bare before her. The Pharaoh hadn't even bothered to read Amy herself, secure in the knowledge that exposing the Doctor's most shameful secret before her had already devastated his old enemy. Yes, the Doctor had had an excellent view of Amy's reaction - the confusion, followed by disbelief, and then - after seeing his own horrified visage - the dawning realization that what the evil bastard said was true. And then, then the dismay set in.

That he wanted her. That he hated watching her with Rory, no matter how much he loved them both.

That he was _in love_ with her.

The Doctor shook his head, gazing down at his hands, moving restlessly across the console. They'd rescued Rory on their way out, and now his Ponds were safely asleep in their quarters.

Or quiet in there, anyway. Were they asleep, or did they just now know that he could hear them if they didn't keep their voices down?

Had she told Rory? Had it been on purpose that the Pharaoh had not had Rory present for his big, exciting revelation? At the moment, the mortified Doctor had been relieved that he had been spared at least that one, tiny, further indignity, but now that he was spending the night tortured by the uncertainty of whether Amy would tell her husband or not, he wondered if it'd all been calculated.

Would she tell him?

_We know what your hearts want…_

It didn't matter what his hearts wanted. He'd known, known beyond a shadow of a doubt, he'd known the moment that Rory announced his intention to go the long way round, to protect Amy as she waited, stasis-locked inside the Pandorica, for her resurrection.

"_Look me in the eye, and tell me she wouldn't be safer... Answer me!"_

And he, reluctantly: "_Yes. Obviously."_

He'd known in that moment. Oh, he'd had his rules even before then, had somehow managed to peel Amy off of him after the crash of the Byzantium, had fetched Rory from his stag party to help get Amy's head on straight. Heck, he'd rebooted the universe in order to make it to their wedding.

No dallying with human companions. It was a bad idea on so many levels.

But it was in the moment that Rory announced his intention to wait for her that he'd known: Rory actually, truly deserved Amy Pond.

And, obviously, the Doctor did not.

* * *

And what the hell was she supposed to do now?

Did they just go on, hopping galaxies and saving worlds, pretending that she didn't know?

She couldn't tell Rory, that was clear. In all these years, the Doctor had kept the depth of his feelings hidden from them both. There was no denying the attraction between them, but he'd drawn a line in the sand and shown absolutely no inclination to cross it, or to allow it to be crossed.

He'd done everything - including rebooting the universe! - to keep Amy and Rory together. And after all the adventures they'd had with him, it was true, the Ponds had lived a love story that few people could even imagine.

There had been a moment, after the Byzantium, when she had thought that she was supposed to throw Rory over for the madman with a box who had whisked her away on the night before her wedding. But the madman had turned her down, and brought Rory on board the TARDIS, and in the ensuing years she had come to understand that it was actually Rory. That it had _always_ been Rory, with his stupid face, that it always would be Rory, and that that was how it should be.

Rory, the Last Centurion. Rory, the Boy Who Waited. Rory, the Doctor's other Pond.

She knew how much the Doctor loved him, almost as much as he loved her. She _knew_ it. The idea that the Doctor had been wanting her, in _love_ with her, that he found it painful to watch her with Rory… it was just absurd.

Absurd. And evidently true, judging from the deeply stricken look on the Doctor's face when it was revealed.

Rory could never know. But Amy didn't even know how to keep this a secret.

_We know what your hearts want, Time Lord, and her name is Amelia Pond..._

* * *

"No flies on the Roman," the Doctor had once said, sarcastically, but the truth was that Rory Williams was a little brighter than even his own wife gave him credit for. Live through a couple of millennia - live through wars, and famines, while witnessing human civilization birthed from its cradle - and you pick up on a thing or two.

For instance, he knew something was up with Amy and the Doctor. He just didn't quite know what.

Whatever it was, it had happened a few days ago, on Belarus. As per standard operating procedure, they'd been taken captive, but Rory had just been thrown in a cell while the other two were taken before the High Pharaoh.

For some reason, though, they'd both been dodgy about what had happened there. The Doctor had done a Thing and they'd all gotten out unscathed, but ever since, Amy and the Doctor had been giving each other a wide, semi-awkward berth.

He saw it in the way that they didn't brush against each other, saw it in the way that their eyes slid past each other's gaze. The Ponds had been with the Doctor for unknown years now - it was hard to count, when you spent so much time in the vortex - but the Doctor had never been much of one for personal space, and the three of them had developed a highly physical friendship from the outset.

Which had suddenly, inexplicably become troubled.

Not for Rory. He unthinkingly ran a hand across the Doctor's shoulder when moving past him around the console, and he'd always submitted gracefully to the Doctor's tendency toward inappropriate hugs. Ever since the Pandorica, and their wedding, there'd been no question about Amy's loyalty. Not for Amy, not for Rory, and certainly not for the Doctor.

So what was with all the forced congeniality, and the rapidity of the galaxy-hopping spree that the Doctor had been set madly upon in the last few days, and the strange distance between their bodies, as if they were stars orbiting each other at a specific gravity?

He could have just asked Amy. He could see it in the furrow of her brow; in the set of her mouth. She knew what was up, and she wasn't volunteering the information. But he didn't believe that she'd lie to him, if pressed.

But if there was one skill that Rory Williams had - and there were, in actuality, many that he had picked up over the centuries - it was patience. Patience, in spades. And so instead of asking, he merely watched, for now. Watched them moving around each other. Watched them playacting at their usual warmth and intimacy. And watched them both watching him to see if he had noticed.

He had noticed.

* * *

Time - or something like it - passed, even on the TARDIS.

They saved a few worlds, they averted a few disasters, they even occasionally made a difference in the life of a single individual, or a family, or a people. They wandered through the seedy backsides of intergalactic marketplaces; they picnicked in wondrous but remote locations untouched by man or alien. They attended the races. They rescued a bona fide flying saucer from annihilation at the hands of its own sentient cooling system. They met Galileo Galilei - for the Doctor, a second time.

And Amy and the Doctor orbited each other carefully. And the Doctor orbited Rory as well. Amy fell asleep under her husband's arm every night after they'd survived the day's adventures, and Rory watched his wife and his best friend make broad arcs around each other in the light of day.

And time, or something like it, passed.

* * *

Over the years, he knew that she had not forgotten, though she did her best to let him believe that she might have.

He knew that she had never told Rory the full truth as well. He could see it in the Roman's eyes when he watched them.

Rory had always watched them - it was his nature, not a expression of mistrust. There was no mistrust, not anymore. Rory watched everything, everyone. He'd done it even before the Pandorica, but his millennia of waiting had sharpened the habit to a razor's edge.

The Doctor would have bet dollars to doughnuts - if he had either - that Rory had not asked her about it, either. Because he believed that if Rory had asked her, that Amy would have confessed.

But Amy didn't flirt with the Doctor anymore. Amelia Pond, who had demanded that her imaginary friend kiss the bride in front of every guest at her wedding. Amelia Pond, who had no qualms about depositing herself in his lap to get his attention when she felt that he was being inconveniently distracted. Amelia Pond, whose fingers had trailed across (almost) every inch of his body in passing, whose red hair he knew the scent of almost as well as his own, who had started flirting with him at the tender age of seven years old.

And she no longer flirted with him.

To his great relief, the warmth had returned to their friendship. He'd never stopped grabbing her hand - and Rory's - as he shouted for them to run from some sudden threat or another, and the teasing had come back as well. All was not lost. His Ponds still adored him, he knew.

But something had changed, on Belarus. Amy was never supposed to find out about how deep his feelings for her ran.

Amy belonged with Rory. There was no point to anything else.

And over those years, the Doctor thought of the day on Belarus as the day when everything had changed between them. But in the end, it turned out that he was mistaken.

The day when everything _really_ changed between them came much, much later.

* * *

It was a Thursday.

Actually, it wasn't exactly a Thursday. It was just that they were in the time vortex, and the previous day when they'd been planetside somewhere it'd been a Wednesday, and the Ponds had had one night's sleep since then, so Thursday was sort of the closest approximation of what day it was.

So fine, call it a Thursday.

He was trying to reroute the temporal rectifier through the exhaust system, though if you'd asked him _why_ he'd decided to do that, at this point he wasn't sure he could reconstruct his reasoning any more. It wasn't going very well, but since no one else in the entire universe still remembered how to maintain a TARDIS, there was no one to help him and no one to criticise his efforts. Rory was playing a round of darts down below while engaged in a heated debate on some topic or another with his wife, who was perched up above on the jump seat.

The Doctor was half-listening to their chatter and half-doing a dozen other things with his hyperactive toddler of a brain, even as his fingers worked at the couplings and his eyes noted some unusual visual input…

Stop.

Oh _no_.

His fingers paused in their manipulations, frozen in midair.

Amy was leaning forward over the back of the jump seat to emphasize her point to Rory down below. The Doctor's entire brain immediately went haywire at the sight of her, most specifically, her exposed backside.

Her skirt was brief and she appeared to be wearing - well, _something_ - scant, and perhaps lacy, beneath it. She was leaning forward further than she realized as she'd gotten involved in the argument with Rory and lost track of the fact that the Doctor was working behind her. The underside of her arse was left fully exposed by her knickers, and the satin-covered swell of her mons itself was visible at this angle. Damn Amy Pond's skirts anyway.

And this young regeneration, too. Damn the appetites of youth.

He heard Rory's rejoinder, but it was all he could do to keep his breathing even as his hearts beat hard in his chest. At least she was too far away to detect her scent, he thought frantically. He felt strangely captive to the display, unable to kick his brain back into gear on the project that he'd been absorbed in for hours. Years of half-denied fantasies were suddenly racing through his brain at light speed.

And then he realized that she had glanced back over her shoulder at him, and now was watching him. Watching him, watching her.

Their eyes were locked now. He knew full well that the expression on his face must be one of naked desire. Her own gaze was guarded; she looked neither perceptibly dismayed nor pleased.

But then, surprisingly, she didn't look annoyed. Or look away.

Rory was still talking, as Amy rotated in the jumpseat, turning her body back toward the Doctor. She slid downward, letting her knees part, and was now clearly giving him a deliberate view of her knickers.

The Doctor shook his head at her in dismay. She opened her mouth to speak, and he realized that she was still responding to Rory, keeping up her side of the dialogue that - along with his dart practice - was keeping him from noticing the drama unexpectedly unfolding on the levels above him.

Amy's fingers slid down her body to the apex of her thighs, now trailing across the flimsy fabric of her knickers. She was touching herself. Dragging her fingertips across the probably-moist curves of her sex, and he could see the long muscles of her inner thighs twitch in response.

She was teasing him. On purpose.

The Doctor closed his eyes for a long moment, hoping that Amy would come to her senses in the meantime. Rory's voice carried on reassuringly - his tones were animated due to the heated debate between the two, but not rising in shock or outrage or fury, so they hadn't been caught yet.

_She._ He corrected that to: _she_ hadn't been caught yet. Not _them_. _He'd_ done nothing wrong. Nothing except gotten caught looking at something that he could not have… not a crime. It was _Amy_ who was crossing a line. _Amy_ who Rory should be angry with, if he noticed what was happening.

He opened his eyes again.

_Amy_ who was touching herself while looking him straight in the eye, not a hint of a blush on her pretty cheeks.

He could no longer pretend that the eye contact was not heated. The Doctor let his hands fall from where they'd been frozen mid-reroute near the rectifier, no longer pretending to be at work. Amy slid a fingertip under the edge of her knickers, getting ready to push the fabric aside, to expose her beautiful, glistening sex to him.

The Doctor turned and fled from the room.

* * *

She hadn't really been sleeping that well - too distracted with thoughts of that single moment in the console room earlier today - when she discovered that their bathroom had disappeared.

She'd gotten up to pee, but the bathroom off their quarters was just… gone. Amy frowned at the wall, then glanced over her shoulder at Rory's lightly snoring, shirtless form. Well.

She really did have to pee.

She sighed, wishing she could just use her own bathroom and go back to bed. She had an inkling what this was about - it was either the TARDIS herself or the Doctor who had taken away her bathroom, and under the circumstances she was concerned that it was probably the latter.

She wrapped herself in a robe and headed out into the corridor to find the nearest bathroom.

Fortunately he didn't make her hunt too long, and he allowed her to resolve her business before staging the inevitable confrontation. She came around a corner headed back to her room, trying to hold onto a glimmer of hope that she was still about to go back to bed, and there he was. He was in his shirtsleeves, bowtie and braces, leaning against the wall of the corridor, arms crossed casually, an expectant look on his face.

Amy froze. "Doctor." She eyed him warily.

He returned the look. Never had the air between them been simultaneously so chilly and so heated. She suddenly wished that she'd put on a longer robe.

"Amelia Pond." He said her name slowly. "What _was_ that little display in my console room today?"

So he was going to be all direct about it now, was he?

Amy crossed her arms now too, with a defiant air. She tried not to notice how incredibly attractive he was, with his lean forearms, his elegant wrists and hands and jawline. His hair was reasonably trimmed. When she'd first met him, he hadn't been as careful with his appearance. She wondered why he put the effort in now.

"I'm waiting," he reminded her, though she had no good answer to his question.

Amy found herself shrugging uncomfortably. "I just… saw you, _looking_. With that look on your face. It just… I guess it caught me by surprise. I'm sorry if I did something wrong, Doctor. You know I'd never want to hurt you, or Rory."

He shook his head. "That wasn't a very good way to show it… not wanting to hurt Rory."

At that, Amy looked properly abashed. "I know."

"Amy… perhaps I've been mistaken, that we've never spoken of this." He scratched his cheek, hesitating a moment before continuing. "Maybe you have something that you need to say to me, about… what you overheard. On Belarus."

Amy took a deep breath, wondering if she did. Obviously the exposure of his hidden feelings had changed their relationship. Obviously she had some feelings of her own about that.

Obviously she had complicated feelings for _him_.

"Is it true? What he said?" She blurted the obvious question first.

The Doctor closed his eyes briefly. "Yes. Of course it is. You know it is." He looked pained.

"Then why…" she trailed off, looking to him for permission to actually ask the next question.

He looked resigned. "Why did I say no to you that night, when you took me back to your bedroom?" he finished the question for her, and she knew that her expression confirmed his guess.

He sighed, and when he spoke, his voice was weary. "Because, Amy, you're only human."

He pressed on even as she began to bristle: "No, no!" he exclaimed. "Just listen! What will you live, a hundred years, a hundred and fifty if you avail yourself of advances from beyond your own time? Amy, I'm over a _thousand years_ old. My brain is filled with knowledge that would burn yours from your skull. Pond, I'm sorry, but you _all_ look like children to me." He sounded openly exasperated.

Amy blushed before his dismissal of her entire species. "You weren't looking at me like you would a child in the console room today, were you, Doctor?" she challenged hotly. "The Belarian High Pharaoh said that you _covet_ me, that you _want_ me. That's not how you feel about a child."

The Doctor exhaled, looking away from his wayward companion. She knew she had him. It was hard to keep up the pretense that all humans were mere children - a conceit that she guessed must have smoothed over many of his tensions with many past companions - when she was pretty sure that that was an erection marring the line of his trousers as they bickered.

"I had hoped that you might refrain from using that against me," he finally said in a soft voice, and Amy instantly flushed again.

It was her bloody Scottish temper. It got her into trouble every time.

"I'm sorry, Doctor, but the point stands," she said in a more conciliatory voice.

He raked one hand through his hair. "What is it you want from me then?" he demanded. "A confession, that you caught me staring at you today? You did, ding-dong, get that woman some sort of cookie! Amy, you _know_ how I feel about you! What is the point of all this?"

Amy gazed up at him defiantly. "Maybe I'm tired of being held at arm's length because you can't deal with your schoolboy crush on your best friend! Maybe I'm _tired_ of being treated like a child!" She realized abruptly that she was actually yelling.

And what the hell was she saying? Amy didn't even exactly think that her accusations were fair or right, but she just knew that she was frustrated - _incredibly_ frustrated - with him and she needed to saying something, something _awful_, to express it.

And, indeed, the Doctor looked rather stricken, if not quite as badly as he had that day so long ago on Belarus.

They stood there for a long moment, staring at each other in the wake of Amy's angry outburst. Then, suddenly, the Doctor's expression shifted. From hurt, to annoyed.

He suddenly, inexplicably, began stalking toward her. Amy found herself immediately taking a step back. He just looked so… business-like.

He backed her right up to the wall and got in her face, his voice low and angry. "Did you ever think to wonder why it is, Amelia Pond, that I hold you at arm's length? In all these many years that you have traveled by my side, have I ever done _anything _other than attempt - too often, unsuccessfully, I admit - to keep you safe? Did it even once occur to you to think that maybe I keep you 'at arm's length' _in order to keep you safe_?"

Amy stared right back at him, not yet fully cowed. "How am I supposed to know anything about why you do what you do if _you don't tell me_, Doctor?" she retorted hotly.

He was awfully close to her now. He was tall, but then so was she, so she was grateful that he couldn't actually tower over her. But it was clear that he had her on the retreat.

"My dear, you clearly are not paying attention, and I don't think that you've really thought about this very hard. I want to point out to you, Amelia, that you are attempting to play games with a man who can _read your mind_." His eyes glittered as he spoke, and Amy suddenly was taken aback by his reminder. She often forgot that the Doctor was telepathic, since it seemed that he had some kind of etiquette about it that kept him from using it in everyday situations. But wasn't it always true when his eyes were actually locked with hers - the way that they were, right now - that she could always kind of feel him fluttering about at the edges of her mind?

The Doctor placed his hands on the wall on either side of Amy's head and leaned forward just a few degrees. "Listen to me, and listen well. Being only human, you have no idea what it's like, to be intimate with a lover who is psychic. A lover who knows exactly how to lean into you, exactly how to touch you right _here…_"

Amy's gaze was caught up in his, and she gasped aloud as she felt the flutter of his fingertips at the side of her breast. She arched toward him almost before she'd even realized what he was doing, a low moan escaping her, and he chuckled under his breath as his fingers danced across her ribs.

His fingertips and his mind, both teasing at her edges, and she felt the strange sensation of someone else moving easily inside of her skull. It was disorienting, and she found herself breathing heavily beneath his feather-light touch.

"I see," he was breathing, his darkened green eyes still holding her gaze as he thumbed gently through the pages of her mind. That was why he was touching her, in order to read her mind, but the _effect_ he was having... "Rory tries so hard, doesn't he, but he never _quite _manages to push the right button. Some of them, yes, sure. I'm glad to see that our Centurion is no slouch. But there's one in particular-" his large, cool hand, sliding inside of her robe, and then, "-right here, isn't it?" His fingers on her bare nipple, tugging. "Like _this_."

And he pinched, rather hard, much harder than Rory ever did, rolling her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, so that a jolt of arousal shot straight to the base of her belly and downward. Then just as astutely, just as it was about to become too much, he eased his grip, back to a firm tugging that caused a flood of moisture in her knickers almost instantaneously, as if someone had given him the user's manual for her body.

He smirked in obvious response to her panicked thought. His finger drew a lazy circle around her areola and she continued to arch into him, her body melting beneath his touch. "Do you understand yet, my dear? No human can retain anything remotely like free will under the hand of a Time Lord. It's just not a good match."

He leaned in a little further. "So tell me, Amelia Pond, can _you_ resist me? Remain faithful to your husband? Tell me what you want me to do next," he whispered, searching her gaze.

She bit her lip anxiously for a long moment, some small, loyal part of her raging against the Doctor's onslaught. But his hand continued to touch her, coax her, to anticipate her desire like an itch being endlessly scratched, and she couldn't hold out for long.

"More," she whispered raggedly as his cool palm glided over the hollow of her waist. "Please, Doctor."

"More what?" he prompted gently, mouth not quite close enough to satisfy her, fingers giving her _most_ of what she craved.

She looked into his eyes. "More of you, Doctor."

Grim satisfaction. That was what he had been waiting to hear. So she was surprised, when he responded by stepping back, letting his hands fall away from her body.

Her robe was undone, hanging open, but she made little attempt to cover herself. One pale pink nipple was fully exposed, but the Doctor's gaze was no longer wandering. His expression was sad as Amy stared up at him in confusion.

He held up a hand. "Amy. Amelia. Please," he preempted. "Look at you."

She flushed and snatched her robe closed, tying the sash as she glared up at him, coming back to herself as a result of the rush of embarrassment.

"That's not what I meant," he said tiredly, gesturing apologetically. "I mean, look at what I've done to you. I need you to understand that you can _not_ play with me like this. If you manage to provoke me into actually giving into temptation for just a moment, Amy, then you don't stand a chance. You _don't want_ everything that unfolds after that one moment's lapse."

"Oh, so that - that entire seduction was intended as an _educational demonstration_?" she snapped angrily, and she noted with satisfaction that the Doctor was flushing now. "Totally altruistic, just making a point?"

"Amy, you would have _begged_ me to take you just now, that ring on your hand be damned, if I hadn't stopped myself! Don't you understand what I'm trying to tell you? For your sake, and my sake, and above all else for Rory's sake, you have _got_ to leave this alone!" His voice had been rising as he went, and he was near to yelling now, but then he seemed to catch himself and he went on in less strident tones. "No more games, eh, Amy? Just good, old-fashioned, love and friendship and respect with your Raggedy Doctor. C'mon, Pond, that's gotta be enough. I know it is." His words were genuinely pleading.

She regarded him with narrowed eyes all through his little lecture, still feeling her body thrumming with the flood of arousal that he'd managed to awaken with the briefest touch of his hand. This preternatural-potency-of-a-psychic-seducer schtick was apparently no joke. But she still wasn't buying that his own little "display" had been solely for her benefit.

She had a theory that he'd just really badly wanted to lay his hands on her body, and so had invented an excuse.

And he knew that that was what she was thinking.

So, stalemate.

Amy knew the Doctor could read all this in her eyes… that had always been true of her and her Raggedy Man, that they could follow one another's trains of thought so accurately that they could execute a plan in tandem from across the room with merely one meaningful look. He saw her consider his argument, critique his methods, and decide that they were done for the night in the space of only a few heartbeats, and he nodded in tired acquiescence.

"Good night, Raggedy Man," she whispered finally, turning to find her bed without their usual embrace.

"Good night, Amelia," he replied softly to her retreating back.

* * *

And again, something had changed. Again, Rory considered sitting his wife down and asking her the question.

Because he was no idiot, and the sexual tension between the Doctor and his wife had recently gone off the rails.

Oh, it'd always been there. Rory knew that his wife was an exceptionally beautiful woman, and the Doctor was (Rory admitted fairly easily after all this time) a sometimes dangerously handsome and charismatic man. And the two of them had a History.

Of course, so did Amy and Rory… their romance was now an epic tale worth telling in its own right. It made it easier, that the Doctor would always be Amy's Raggedy Man. True enough, but _he_ would always be Amy's Last Centurion, and _their_ tale was a tale of mutual devotion.

But the tale of Amelia Pond and the Raggedy Doctor was a fairytale romance. It always had been, and even the fact that the Doctor had turned down Amy's one advance and then whisked Rory away with them to ensure that the heroine had her knight in shining armor - even that was part of the romance, wasn't it? Rory actually understood that his marriage, as remarkable as it was, never had been and never would be fully his own, that the Doctor had been there from the beginning and would, in some sense, be there until the end. Amy and Rory would both someday slip from this universe, and on that day they would be remembering their time, together, with him.

Honestly, Rory didn't even particularly resent it anymore. He couldn't. The Doctor had shown them a universe beyond either of their wildest imaginations, had shepherded them through experiences that would forever change who they were. Rory _was_ the Last Centurion because of the Doctor. And Amy was the Girl Who Waited. And the man that she'd Waited on was the Doctor.

If the Doctor was somehow a little bit in love with Amelia Pond, if that somehow gave him solace, Rory could no longer begrudge him the comfort, or the spark of warmth, in a long, often lonely life.

And if Amy would always love the Doctor? Well, so did Rory. He knew that if there ever came a day when she could only have one of them, it would be him, Rory. He could live with the rest.

He'd come to peace with the terms of his marriage, he truly had. But as he watched Amy and the Doctor and their hurt, angry tension together, their ugly guilt showing on their faces when either of them was looking at him and thought he didn't know… he wondered if they needed to come to peace, as well.

* * *

When the blow up came, it was dramatic.

They were all reading, sprawled around the console room. Usually they found a nice park somewhere - some sunny weather - when they settled in for a stint with books in hand. But today was the equivalent of a rainy day on the TARDIS… a languid mood had hit them all at once, and they'd found themselves still with cups of tea and books in hand, a few hours after the Ponds had come looking for their Doctor after they'd finished sleeping.

He'd whipped them up a decent quiche and the Ponds kept the larder stocked with fruits and cheeses, so they were licking their fingers between pages, and the Doctor had put on the Missa Papae Marcelli. Rory had drifted off listening to the mass between chapters, and the Doctor and Amy started to bicker over what they should do next.

"You're looking for trouble on purpose these days, Doctor! Look at how our last three stops have turned out!" Amy was flushed with the knowledge that she was right.

It was true that the Doctor was being a little more reckless than usual. Which usually meant he was trying to distract himself from something. All three of them knew that.

"You know that this is how I travel, Pond. I've never made any bones about it." The Doctor hadn't yet taken his eyes off of his book, as if the argument with Amy weren't worth his full attention.

She'd apparently had enough of that, and she put down her book on the jump seat where she'd just been lounging, stalked over to the Doctor where he was sprawled across some stairs, and put her hand palm-down on the page he was reading. The Doctor sighed and leaned back, pulling his book away from her, but marking his page and setting it aside.

"Yes, and if I recall correctly, you're filled with angst over how many of your former companions have died or come to otherwise unfortunate ends as a result of their travels with you!" Amy stood over him, hands on hips. It was a hell of a punch to throw, and even Rory stiffened where he lay looking as if he'd drifted off.

The Doctor closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again to regard her. "Haven't I always kept you and Rory safe?" he asked, in a strained voice.

She wasn't backing down. "I suppose that depends on what you mean by 'safe,' doesn't it, Doctor? How many times now has Rory _died_ under your care?"

At that, Rory could apparently no longer pretend he was ignoring them, and he opened his eyes reluctantly and sat up to watch this play out.

The Doctor was also flushed now, and looked like a man who was holding on to his calm facade by a thread. "Rory, I see, is _that_ what this is about? Your concern for him?" He sounded skeptical. "I can't help but notice, Amelia, that _he's not the one complaining_ to me right now. Rory knows how I travel, so he had me teach him to use the scanner so that he can do his own research when he wants to! Because _Rory_ is an adult!"

The temperature in the room instantly dropped another couple of degrees, and it was clear even to Rory that another low blow had just been landed.

They both suddenly glanced over at him, as if they'd forgotten for a moment that the object of their debate was a human being who was presently in the room. Rory for his part had a mildly quizzical expression, looking back and forth between them, both of them openly furious now.

"So… what the hell is going on between you two?" Rory asked calmly.

They both blanched in unison, but Rory sat patiently awaiting some response from either of them. The Doctor raked a hand through his hair and suddenly turned and strode out of the console room, destination unknown.

Amy deflated then, and gave Rory a long, lost look. After another moment, he stood up and took her in his arms, letting her come to rest against his shoulder, knowing she needed comfort even if he didn't exactly know why.

* * *

"We never should have left the TARDIS when Rory was sick!" she hissed in irritation, bolting into a small closet after him and turning to pull the door shut with a sickening finality that made her a bit nauseous. "How long are we going to have to wait?"

"Just a couple of hours, now please _settle down_," he whispered back, exactly as if to a wayward child, as he briefly soniced the door. He pulled her back so that they could both stretch their long legs as much as possible, but it was far from a comfortable space to wait in.

"Can't we just wait until it's quiet for a few minutes and then _go_?" she insisted, stiffening at the proximity of his body.

He exhaled in obvious irritation. "Yes. If you fancy getting captured and leaving Rory alone for a day or two until I figure out a _Thing_ to get us out." His voice was pitched much lower than hers had been. "Now for god's sake, _shut up_, Amy! They have excellent hearing!"

They both fell silent, then, and Amy could tell that he was having as difficult a time relaxing as she was. She tried to even out her breathing, to dispel the tautness from her muscles. But then after only a few seconds she would start to become aware of his closeness again, his body, cooler than hers but still warmer than the walls of the pantry, the tweed of his jacket, the masculine smell of him, and she'd find that she had tensed up all over again.

She didn't know how much time had passed, before she heard his low whisper, right in her ear, his breath wafting across the side of her neck: "There was a time when this would have been pleasant for both of us. Why can't it be like that again?"

She shivered, and thought that that was as good an answer to his question as any. But she took a moment, composing her response, composing _herself_ really.

"Because, Doctor, I want you just as badly as you want me, but I don't have your extra-special Time Lord-y ability to just ignore it."

She heard his intake of breath at her admission. He must have known - why did he _think_ this was getting so complicated? - but hearing her say it out loud seemed to affect him.

Another long moment passed, and she wasn't sure if the conversation was over. But finally he spoke again.

"I don't want this to tear our family apart," he said simply.

Her heart caught in her throat at that. Rory. Patient, quiet Rory. Rory, who knew that something was deeply wrong between them, who had called them on it to their faces and they had both run away from him in response.

"What are we supposed to do?" she responded slowly, letting her sincere confusion sound in her voice. "Doctor, I don't know what we're supposed to _do_ about it."

It was true, she could barely feel his breath against her neck except when he spoke, and yet the proximity was driving her utterly out of her mind. Her knickers were absolutely sodden, she could tell, and she knew that with his alien senses he almost certainly knew it.

But then, she was pretty sure that it wasn't his sonic screwdriver that was nudging her in the hip. Her plea was serious. She just wasn't sure how to want him this badly and keep from acting on it.

He brushed his mouth, then, against the side of her throat. It was a butterfly kiss, light and testing, and Amy groaned almost without sound and tilted her head away from him to give him better access. She felt a surge of vindication - his little display in the corridor that night _had_ been an excuse for him to touch her. She'd _known_ it.

"I told you, Amelia… if I give into temptation, even once, you're not going to be able to stop me. This… this isn't fair to Rory. It just isn't. And Rory is a good man." It sounded very much like he was trying to convince himself as much as her, especially as his words were so low that she had to strain to make them out.

"Is that what you need in order to do this, Doctor? Limits?" Her words were soft but impassioned. She shifted against him, obviously deliberately, nestled her arse up against his groin and felt the clear evidence of his desire. She suddenly felt reckless and so very, very frustrated. "I've got a limit for you then."

She waited, to see if he would take the bait. His breathing was even for a moment, then his words came: "What do you mean, Pond?"

She reached down between them and lifted her brief skirt, pressing her knickers right up against his trousers. Then she shimmied those tiny knickers right down over her hips, and it was her bare bottom that she was pressing against him.

Another sharp intake of breath as he tried to pull away from her, but didn't have much of anywhere to go. "What are you _doing_?" he hissed.

She turned as if to look at him over her shoulder, though her human eyes couldn't truly make him out in the darkness. "Offering you what Rory won't have," she said cryptically. "So that you have a limit."

They were frozen like that, as Amy wasn't quite brazen enough to rub against him, but she could feel that he was pressing back into her, unable to reject the pressure she offered. Now his voice was slightly strangled. "What do you mean?" he asked again.

"Ever since I was a little girl," she told him slowly, pushing back just a little more against him, "I've gotten myself off almost exclusively to the idea of getting fucked in the arse, Doctor." At this, he definitely stiffened against her. "But Rory won't do it. It's too dirty for him. So there you go, Doctor, you can have me in a way that he's turned me down, have a part of me that he doesn't even want. And give me what I've most wanted all my life in return, and for you… you get to have me, Doctor. Finally. Just once, just this one time… don't you want to actually _know_ how it feels to be inside of me?"

She knew that he did want it. Had direct evidence, actually. Evidence that she could have sworn _throbbed_ against her at her words. The whole thing sounded insane, even to herself, but years of frustration with Rory and the Doctor both were coming to a sudden head inside of her.

The silence stretched out between them, and Amy just pressed back, gently, waiting, feeling him every so often shift just the slightest, incremental amount against her.

He was thinking.

He was thinking about taking her up on it.

His cool hand slid down her arm, to her hip. Her skin rose instantly to gooseflesh beneath his touch - he was _touching_ her. Then his palm rounded behind her, and his fingers slipped into the cleft of her body, and Amy couldn't help but lean forward slightly as she felt the Doctor probe gently at what she had offered him. Oh _god_.

Rory had gotten this far - would finger her - but she had to ask for it every time. The pad of the Doctor's fingertip pressed inward and she felt her entire body respond as she opened up to him eagerly, her mind still spinning that this was even happening. It was enough to send her nervous system into an instant haywire state, as her body had spent so much time wanting this so badly and getting it so rarely.

He seemed to drink in her response, his mouth latching on to the side of her throat, open far enough for her to feel the wetness of him. She hoped he wouldn't leave a mark, but was willing to deal with it if he did. He was a telepath. She assumed that the more responsive she was - no difficulty under the circumstances - the harder it would be for him to resist her.

She arched, quietly, trying to retain enough presence of mind to move carefully. Then he pulled his finger from her body and she almost protested, until she realized that he'd brought his hand up and over her shoulder. Amy accepted his fingers into her mouth eagerly, laving him with saliva, not caring in the least about her own musky smell and taste on his hand.

The Doctor's fingers were in her mouth. The fingers that she'd watched re-wire the TARDIS, handle the sonic, save worlds.

His erection was formidable against her hip now, and it was true that she'd never done this before, but she felt somehow sure that she was going to be able to rise to the occasion. Anything to finally feel him inside of her.

And wasn't that the argument that was breaking his resolve in the end, as well?

His hand, again, down below, fingers wet with her own saliva now. One finger and then promptly two and she loved the feeling of starting to stretch for him.

"More," she whispered immediately, pushing back. "Three."

He obliged, turning his fingers in her body to spread the moisture around.

Her mouth opened wide at the pressure, but after a long moment she managed to catch her breath.

"I'm wet enough to make this easy, Doctor," she whispered. "Just borrow it from my cunt."

She felt him shake his head hard against her shoulder. "No, Amy." His voice was hard even though barely audible. "I won't touch you there. That's not mine."

_So that's how he needs it to be,_ she realized. He'd let her talk him into this, but there was still a line in the sand that he would not cross. The Doctor, master of rationalization.

But then she couldn't spare many neurons to think about that, because his fingers were inside of her, turning slowly, stretching her deliberately to ready her for what came next.

He was going to fuck her.

He was going to fuck her arse.

The _Doctor_ was going to fuck her arse.

She must have been broadcasting psychically, because she felt him twitch in response to each jarring realization as it hit her.

"Yes, I am," he murmured in her ear, and she heard the zipper of his trousers muffled in the dark.

It was all she could do to swallow the loud moan that wanted to escape her. The Doctor immediately sensed her difficulty, and she felt one of his large hands come around to cover her mouth as the other was working on the project at hand.

He pulled her head back against his shoulder like that, and the feeling of his hand over her mouth to keep her quiet was perhaps the sexiest thing that Amelia Pond had ever experienced in her entire life. He was right. He could read her like a book, and Amy had the strangest feeling that she was inhabiting one of her own fantasies of him instead of reality, and that the Doctor knew it.

"This is how it is for us," he whispered in her ear, and she realized that he was overtly reading her mind now. "This is how it always is."

And she felt him press his erection into the cleft of her body, and his firm girth was already sleek with his own fluids. "It's actually rather handy, how this all works out. I actually don't need any outside help with this sort of thing. We have better control of our bodies than you do." He didn't bother to hide his arrogance about it, and Amy was pushing back against him eagerly, ready to take him into her.

Even just the head of his cock was a challenge, but Amy groaned long and low as he eased his way slowly into her. He slid his hand from over her mouth down to her throat, applying just the lightest pressure across her trachea as he pushed into her. The distraction, the very faintest hint of panic at the idea of her airway being obstructed, it pushed her arousal up another wild notch, making his entrance into her just a touch easier. And just like that, he was inside of her, holding her throat firmly as he slowly buried himself all the way. She pushed back, engulfing him, overcome with the sensation of being filled in a way that she had never felt before.

The Doctor stuttered for just a moment. "Are you sure you've never done this before, Pond?" he asked quietly, as they came to stillness for a moment, joined deeply together.

It was a long moment before she could speak. "You know I haven't," she managed to respond. "Anyway, it's because of you."

It was true, and because he wasn't bothering with his usual etiquette around reading her mind, he must know that she finally understood. He was buried inside of her so easily because of his ability to hear her body, to give her _exactly_ what she needed to drive her instantly to aching, wide-open receptivity.

If Rory had ever decided to do this for her, it would have taken them hours to work up to it.

The Doctor slipped right into her as if she'd known how to do this all her life.

And, slowly, he began to thrust.

His other arm wrapped around her waist, holding her firmly as he bent her forward. She had to brace her hands against the door of the closet, but he was moving carefully against her and they were managing to avoid giving themselves away.

She let herself sink into it, letting guilty thoughts of Rory fall away beneath the onslaught of their long-repressed passion being partially unleashed. If this was going to be the only time, she wanted to experience every second, to remember it clearly.

He'd pledged to keep his hands off of her cunt, and apparently her breasts as well, though his fingers were splayed against the skin of her ribs and her shoulder as he held her. He buried his face in the glory of her hair, mouth near her ear.

"Ah, Amelia, there _is_ something that I want from you. I know you want to give it to me."

His pace was slow and steady, and Amy's hand was at work as well. She could feel her body winding up beneath him. She knew that when she came with him inside of her like this, it was going to be thermonuclear. Staying quiet was going to be a bit of a problem.

She struggled to focus. "What? Anything. Anything you want," she responded mindlessly.

"Now that you've given this to me, I want to know that it will always be mine alone," he whispered hoarsely. "Even if Rory changes his mind, you must say no to him now. No other man, Amelia. This is the one way that you can always belong to me alone now."

She couldn't believe that he dared to say her husband's name in a moment like this, but the fierce possessiveness - and raw hunger - of his words stirred something dark inside of her. Now that she was finally experiencing this, which she had fantasized about forever, he wanted her to promise that she never would again?

"Of course," she agreed immediately, jerking her hips back to meet his now, not caring if she was going to regret the promise.

He was thrusting into her as hard as he dared given their predicament, and Amy wondered wildly if he knew how close she was to coming. Of course he did. He could feel it.

One of her hands was buried between her thighs, helping herself along, as he whispered a final "Mine alone, no other man _ever_," in her ear just as she went over the edge.

And was startled when her entire body went rigid in his arms, as if he had just grabbed her brainstem with a psychic fist and frozen her entire nervous system. She felt herself convulsing - both her cunt and her arse, around his considerable girth - and heard him silently empty himself into her, shaking hard against the length of her body. But she could not move, could not voice her passion, could only tremble violently within his arms as her inner world and his shattered simultaneously around them.

But then she had almost no awareness of her body anymore, as the force of a Time Lord orgasm swept through both of them, and she was suddenly yanked into his psychic world with him, where he processed a flood of sensory input that Amy could barely follow, where the time vortex always roared at the edges of his mind, every minute of every day, and where all of that was suddenly being drowned out by sheer, joyous ecstasy that swept through them both in the space of three hearts beating.

Amy felt him coming inside of her at the same moment that she felt herself coming around him at the same moment that the entire cosmos exploded inside her mind into an event horizon of pleasure. This was like no orgasm that she had ever had in her life. This was like no sex she had ever had in her life. She no longer had any question about what he had meant when he said that doing this wasn't fair to Rory.

He was right, it wasn't.

She hadn't wanted to find herself thinking of him again, already returning to her guilt even before the ecstasy had abated. The Doctor was still buried inside of her. Not for much longer. She needed to think about _him_ right now.

They both shuddered silently, her body released from whatever had paralyzed it. It must have been something he had done, to keep her from giving them away. She panted, trying to catch her breath.

He didn't seem inclined to pull free of her, his arms still wrapped around her at waist and shoulders. She was in no hurry to lose him either, so she put her arms over his to hold him in place.

She was the first to speak, softly, after quite a few long moments had passed. "Let me guess. It can't happen again?"

It didn't particularly feel as if he were softening inside of her, but neither of them had moved for a while so it was hard to tell.

"You know why," he responded, finally easing himself clear of her and tucking himself back away in his trousers.

"He's going to know, you know," she predicted darkly, and could almost feel the glare that the Doctor was giving her from over her shoulder.

"No he won't," the Doctor responded as sharply as he could under the circumstances. "That's the point, Pond, is that there's nothing to know. It happened once, so that you and I could both get it out of our systems. That's the deal. Now we can get back to _how things used to be_."

"Oh, Doctor," Amy found herself breathing. She knew, she knew that even her Raggedy Man knew that nothing was ever that simple, and yet she felt the intensity with which he longed to go back to a time before she had known how he felt for her.

* * *

She was right. She'd known she would be. Rory knew.

Rory always knew.

She didn't even know how he figured it out. Both she and the Doctor continued to care for Rory until he was through his space flu, but never at the same time. So he never even saw the two of them together. But it was true that he knew them both, did Rory Williams, knew them both like the backs of his own hands, and he was smart, and he was good at watching people, and especially good at watching these two people.

So somehow, he figured it out.

It was his first meal back on his feet, so the Doctor had gone into one of his random domestic modes and whipped up a home-cooked meal for the three of them - he claimed it was French, but some of his ingredients were obviously not terrestrial in nature. And they'd sat down to eat it in the kitchen, at the table, because none of them were formal enough to bother with any of the various dining rooms.

Rory came to dinner fully dressed, though he didn't have much strength back yet so he couldn't have imagined that they were going out after dinner. He was carrying himself strangely tonight - almost aggressively - weary but ready. Like a trained soldier.

The Doctor and Amy exchanged a glance. They knew they shouldn't, but they did anyway. It wasn't going to matter.

He knew.

"So, how did it finally happen?" Rory asked, serving himself from the platters on the table.

Amy gave it away by freezing, though the Doctor was proceeding with his meal as if nothing was amiss, thoughtfully chewing as a way to take his time before having to answer. Rory wasn't looking at either of them, just taking a generous helping of each dish and tucking into his dinner with gusto.

"How did what happen, Rory?" the Doctor asked evenly, clearly perceiving that Amy was already panicking.

Rory sat back with a mouth full of potatoes and looked between them as he chewed and swallowed. "Whatever it was. A snog? A shag? You haven't told me yet, but I'm braced for the worst."

Amy put her fork down, a sick look on her face. She might as well as been announcing her guilt from the rooftops. The Doctor merely looked calm, almost dangerously calm, as he sometimes did in times of great stress.

"So, are you going to tell me, Amy?" Rory asked her casually, gesturing with his fork. "Since you're technically the one who's betrayed me here, as you're the one who's wearing my ring? Or are you going to make the Doctor do the dirty work?"

The Doctor looked pained at that, and it was clear that he didn't have the hearts to attempt to assert any innocence before the force of Rory's onslaught. Oh yes. Rory Williams was smarter than anyone often gave him credit for.

"You don't want the details, Rory. I'm serious." Amy was staring at her plate, hands folded in her lap, holding her napkin.

Rory laughed at that, though it was not quite as hard a sound as the Doctor would have expected. He sounded almost… amused, as he glanced between them again.

"Okay. Doctor?" Rory turned and regarded him expectantly.

It was not often that Rory had stood up to him - not often that anyone did - but he would, he'd shown time and again, do so when it came to protecting Amy Pond. And when he did stand up, he meant it.

And right now, he clearly saw himself as protecting Amy Pond.

And he was probably right.

"I'm sorry, Rory," the Doctor said simply, looking him in the eye.

"Uh-huh," Rory answered, staring at him thoughtfully. "And what does that mean to you, Doctor, to tell me that you're sorry? As you stare at the trail of damage that you leave in your wake, what do you imagine that your apologies are worth?"

The Doctor paled, but said nothing else. What could he say? Amy was only supposed to belong to one of the men in the room, and she wore a ring on her hand every day to remind her of it.

Rory turned back to his errant wife. "I guess you're still on the hook, dear. The Doctor clearly isn't up to answering my question, but I do feel that I am owed an honest answer, don't you?"

Amy was, if possible, whiter than the Doctor, her hands visibly shaking. "I talked him into it, Rory. I convinced him to fuck me. Just the once. We thought… we thought that we could get it out of our system. I know… I know it's no excuse."

Rory shook his head, openly amazed. "You say you _know_ it's no excuse, and yet you used it to talk yourself - and apparently the Doctor - into it. And you both thought that you were good enough actors to _hide_ this from me? How stupid do you think I am?"

She said nothing to that, pressing her lips tightly together. Rory almost appeared to be enjoying himself as he worked up a head of steam, and he turned back to the Doctor again with relish.

"I have to admit, I'm surprised that she got you to _fuck_ her," Rory announced crudely, looking the Doctor over. "I thought it'd be an impassioned kiss, stolen in the heat of the moment, that would get you. But no, she actually managed to overcome your vaunted Time Lord self-control," here Rory's words were dripping with sarcasm, "long enough for you to get _all the way_ into her pants. How convenient."

The Doctor blanched at that. "There's nothing I can say to defend myself, Rory. I was weak, and I regret it."

Rory smiled, not pleasantly. "Do you? Do you regret it, Doctor? How about if you show me just the tiniest iota of respect here, and answer me honestly. _Do you regret what you did with my wife?_"

The Doctor's jaw worked uncomfortably for a moment. "Part of me does, Rory."

Amy was nearly catatonic with fear. Rory glanced over at her, then back to the Doctor. "Part of you. Okay. And which part is that?" he demanded.

The Doctor's expression softened, and finally an emotion showed on his face. Strangely, it was affection. "The part that loves _you_ too, Rory."

Rory didn't respond right away, instead rocking back in his chair and crossing his arms, dinner forgotten, and studying the Doctor, who sat demurely and endured his gaze.

"Huh," Rory grunted finally. "_Now_, we're finally getting somewhere." Suddenly he returned to his dinner, and left them both waiting silently for a few minutes before he resumed.

"So, wife, what I really want to know is this: why the _hell_ didn't you just come to me?" He punctuated his words with a jab in the air with his knife as he looked up at her.

Amy looked miserable, clearly aware of the high-stakes nature of her answer to every question right now. "You mean… come to you to tell you that my crush on the Doctor was getting out of control?"

Rory looked at her. "Yeah. That's what I mean." As if she were a child.

Amy looked at the Doctor as if for help. "I guess… I guess it didn't occur to me. It just seemed like something… that had to be hidden."

Rory was shaking his head, and it occurred to the Doctor for the first time that Rory had an awfully good point. "Why?"

Amy looked truly confused now. "Why did it have to be hidden?"

"Yeah." Rory raised his eyebrows. "Why?"

Amy floundered. The Doctor obviously could not help her. Rory continued to look at her as if he expected an answer.

"To keep from hurting you," she tried finally, in an uncharacteristically small voice.

Rory's expression was blank as he regarded her. "Yeah? How'd that work out?"

The silence that followed was brutal, as neither Amy nor the Doctor dared to move a muscle as Rory continued to eat his dinner.

He allowed them to sweat it out, and though it was clear that he was enjoying the power in some grim fashion, neither of them was truly in a position to call him on it. So they sweated instead, and Rory took his time working his way through the various dishes on his plate.

When he was done, he tossed his napkin on the table and leaned his chair back again, regarding his two hostages with irritation. "So here are the new rules."

The Doctor raised his eyebrows - it'd obviously been a long time since anyone had attempted to dictate the rules to him on his own TARDIS - but he said nothing. Just waited.

"No more lies. Not about this. That means no more lies of omission, as well. Lies are dangerous, with our lives."

Both the Doctor and Amy slowly nodded. Rory looked at them, then continued.

"And no more shagging behind my back. Do you both hear me? Whatever this is -" and here Rory gestured between the two of them with his knife, "- it plays out in full view of all involved now. That includes me. My life. My family. I'm a part of this. Do you both understand me?"

Rory locked eyes with the Doctor first. They searched each other's gazes. Rory wanted to know - to be reassured - that the Doctor, in particular, understood what was happening. He was offering a deal. Amy and the Doctor, allowed, in some fashion, to try to work out the thing between them without hiding it from Rory. In fact, with Rory involved. What did 'involved' mean? It wasn't clear, and yet, whatever he meant, what he was offering was clearly the only way forward for them as a family.

"Yes, Rory, I understand," the Doctor said, submissively and without any hint of self-consciousness. He understood, now, the little display that Rory had just put on for their benefit.

No, not really, not for Amy. Amy had been easy, her guilt uncomplicated by arrogance, by hubris. Rory had known that he could have whatever he demanded of Amy.

This had all been for the Doctor. To remind him. That Amy was human - special, yes, but human. But Rory had lived for two thousand years, unlike any human was meant to. Twice as long as he had. To the Doctor, Rory would always be his Other Pond, but Rory Williams wasn't really afraid of him. Not anymore.

He didn't want to be a cuckold.

And in truth, the Doctor didn't want him to be.

"I understand completely," he added, for emphasis, and Rory nodded, an understanding of some sort established between them.

"And you, Mrs. Williams?" he turned back to his wife, who blanched further at his use of her married name. "Did you get that? Full view? Nothing, _nothing_ behind my back."

Amy nodded desperately, with eyes only for her husband. It was humbling, for the Doctor. To be reminded how much power Rory could have over her as well. Rory had always held Amy's heart in his hand, even if the Doctor knew how to inadvertently set it ablaze with desire.

"Fine," Rory pronounced finally. "Now, I'm going back to bed for a bit. You two, work something out, and try to keep the heavy petting to a minimum. Tomorrow I want to go skinny dipping - after that flu, I feel so gross that a thousand showers are never going to get me clean. Somewhere Roman, Doctor. Right now, I want you remembering that you live with a trained warrior." The Doctor raised his eyebrows again, but Rory apparently didn't have it in him to be abashed at the moment, and he stalked out of the room like he owned the TARDIS herself.

A moment of silence passed in his wake. The Doctor looked in open amazement at Amy, who was still white as a sheet and shaking.

"I suppose that could have gone… worse," the Doctor finally commented, still taken aback. "He didn't actually bring his sword to dinner."

"He's not going to leave me," Amy muttered, her eyes slightly wild. "He's staying, Doctor. _He's staying._"

Strangely, it wasn't until that moment that the Doctor realized that, in her way, Amy had been almost as deeply conflicted as he was. Despite her reckless behavior, she had truly been terrified at the prospect of Rory walking away from her.

And truth be told, so had the Doctor.

"Yes, he's staying, Amy," the Doctor agreed. "We're very, very lucky. Honestly, Rory is a better man than _either_ of us deserves to have in our lives."

She began to cry with relief, silent tears running down her cheeks. "He's staying. He's staying." She was repeating it over and over to herself, as if to reassure herself of the fact. Finally, she looked up at the equally stunned Doctor through wet eyes. "In full view? What does he mean?"

The Doctor stood up and came over behind Amy, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. It was a gesture that he'd used a hundred times before, but today it made her shudder. "He means that he will not be made a fool of. And right he is. He said it clearly: he is a part of this. It's time we started acting like it."

She looked up at him from where she sat. It was unlike her to remain meek for so long, but Rory's behavior had deeply shaken her. As it had been meant to do.

"Yes, but what does that _mean_?" she asked in a worried voice.

"Oh, Amelia. Always jumping into things without even being sure of what's happening. I think that we're going to find out tomorrow, my dear. Until then, I suggest that you join your husband and get some sleep." He squeezed her shoulder in passing, then left her alone in the kitchen with the remainder of her meal.

* * *

The Doctor had taken Rory's meaning clearly - there was nothing at stake if he was wrong. He knew just the place, anyway. A bathhouse that would be clean enough for their 21st century sensibilities, private enough for Rory to do what he needed to if he decided to do so. Here, others would look the other way, even if they were bringing a woman in with them.

Rory stripped off easily, revealing the broad shoulders of a man who could wield a spear or sword with equal ease. He didn't glance either of their way as he first walked to the cold pool and plunged all the way beneath its surface.

Amy was disrobing hesitantly, looking toward the Doctor. Rory broke the surface again and gave him a hard look. They both knew why they were here.

Rory wanted the Doctor naked, to keep him off balance.

Normally, the Doctor was not shy in this particular way… if there wasn't sex involved, he'd usually strip off at the drop of a hat. At the moment, it wasn't really clear if sex was directly involved in today's adventure or not, but there was no escaping the undertone. Rory had caught them cheating on him, and his first response had been to demand that they all go to a nude bathhouse together.

He was brilliant. Demented, but brilliant.

The Doctor shrugged out of his jacket, not bothering to balk. There was nothing for it. They were in Rome now - literally - and it was time to do as the Roman among them was doing. The Doctor untied his bowtie, shrugged out of his braces, and quickly got out of his kit.

He was aware of Amy following suit beside him, but now was not the time for ogling her. He kept his eyes front, crossing his arms as he waited for the next cue from Rory.

Who emerged from the cold bath, striding up the stone steps with the water trailing off his long, lean body in rivulets, into the warm air.

Rory crossed his arms and looked at them both, then cocked his head toward the warm pool and led them both toward it, apparently for a soak.

He pulled a bell, and a young servant boy peeked a head in and then ran off to fetch them a bottle of wine. Rory was really getting his Roman on today. And why not? He deserved every advantage that he wanted right now.

"You've never asked to come here… not in the all the time that we've been traveling since the Pandorica," Amy said finally, clearing having a hard time relaxing in the warm water.

Her boys were seeming to have no such difficulty, both of them resting their damp heads back against the edge of the pool and closing their eyes. But then, Amy probably had the least idea among the three of them what was coming.

"I've never wanted to come back," Rory said thoughtfully. "Never missed it, not really. I was just so glad to be back with you." He slitted his eyes, and looked at them both from under his lowered lids.

Amy smiled nervously. "So why now, Rory?" she asked finally.

Rory smiled back at her, rather wickedly. "Ah. Good question. Why now, eh, Doctor? Any theories?" Amy looked between them, clearly confounded.

The Doctor was not smiling, but he did not look unhappy either. He was watching Rory through the damp air warily but affectionately.

"We're here, Amy, because we've come back to a time and place where Rory knows just how to work out his issues with another man. Haven't we, Centurion?"

Rory looked pleased. "That's right, Doctor. In this era, men weren't afraid of each other. They didn't avoid each other. And they certainly didn't need to _compete over women_ to work out their issues with each other."

The Time Lord nodded. "Fair enough," he conceded. "And here we are, you and I, with Amelia beside us. So how do we work out our issues, Rory? You clearly are in charge today, so tell me what we're doing, why don't you?"

Rory stood up off the bench that ran along the edges of the pool, so that he was nearly chest-deep in water. "Well, come here, then."

The Doctor clearly knew the invitation was meant for him, and he pushed away from the edge of the pool, coming up to meet Rory. They were of a near match in height, both lanky with long reaches, and Rory was bringing his hand swiftly to the back of the Doctor's neck to pull him in, a motion that he instantly mirrored. Amy gasped as the two men clashed in the center of the pool and rapidly pulled each other under its surface, struggling for dominance.

For a long moment the contest stayed underwater, with frequent limbs flailing above the surface, though it was impossible to distinguish one man from the other except when one of them broke through to grab a lungful of air. Amy pulled her knees up to her chest against the wall, reluctant to get pulled into the middle of… whatever this was.

After another moment, one man emerged fully from the water, with the other held in a headlock under his arm, controlling whether his opponent could breathe or not. Amy blinked the water out of her eyes, confirming that it was the Doctor who held Rory down, spitting water and screaming his rage before he did something beneath the surface that took the Doctor's legs out from under him.

The fight looked… awfully real. Amy wasn't exactly sure what was happening, but it did appear to involve some sort of violence between her boys.

More wild churning, a few underwater throws, and it was again no longer clear who had the upper hand. Finally Rory reared up out of the water, pulled back, and yanked the Doctor up after him just in time to land a punch square on the Doctor's mouth.

The Doctor's head snapped to the side, blood flying from his split lip. Rory wasted no time, grabbed him by a handful of hair and dragged him over to the steps of the deep bath.

A silent Rory flung the Doctor down on the steps, leaned over and grabbed him by the throat, and held him down on a high enough step that Amy could see the Doctor sputtering for air mere inches below the surface. He pulled him up, shoved him back under for another stretch just to make the point that he could, and then pulled him up, gasping for air, again.

Amy supposed that she shouldn't be surprised that the Doctor somehow seemed to know all the rules of the game. He seemed to hold out about as long as he could, but finally he gave in, grasping at Rory's wrist and tapping it repeatedly for quarter.

At which point, Rory flung the Doctor free, panting hard, and ran his hands wildly through his wet hair. For a strange moment Amy was struck with the fact that this lean but strong and _deadly_ Roman had grown from the scrawny boy that she'd befriended in third grade. Everything about her life was unbelievable.

The Doctor rolled out of the water rather pathetically, the blood flowing freely from his split lip, leaving a trail in the water beneath him. He was holding his side gingerly, and regarded Rory with newfound respect. "You know, I am a Time Lord," the Doctor choked out through his bruised throat. "I'm supposed to be stronger than you."

It was clear now that Rory was sporting his own black eye as well as a number of scrapes and bruises, but there was no question about who the victor was. He threw the Doctor a dismissive look. "Yeah? I'm done being impressed that you're a Time Lord, Doctor. You may be smart, but you seem an awful lot like any other man to me in the important ways."

The Doctor felt around his throat for damage. "I guess that's fair enough at this exact moment in time," he admitted reluctantly.

Amy was watching them cautiously. "So… did you two just fight over me?" she threw out, experimentally.

The Doctor winced, and Rory turned on her angrily. Evidently that had been the wrong thing to say.

"No, Amy, you see, we did _not_ just fight over you," Rory correctly her harshly. "That just goes to show how little attention you've been paying this whole time. The Doctor and I just foughtover _us_, him and I, not over you. You see, you've got something to get used to here, just like the Doctor needed to. As shocking as you may find this, wife, this is actually not _all about you_."

And with that, she was shocked as Rory turned, grabbed the Doctor by the back of the neck, and pulled him in for a bruising kiss right there on the steps.

She was stunned to see the Doctor basically melt in Rory's arms. The Time Lord allowed himself to be plundered, opening his mouth to Rory immediately, and Amy was struck by the sudden realization that she'd never even kissed him, and now Rory had. Was. Presently.

And she was watching. And it was some kiss. Amy wasn't really sure how she was supposed to react, so she just sat there dumbfounded while Rory kissed the Doctor long and thoroughly, blood visibly smeared on their mouths, and when he finally pulled away, slowly, she noted that both of them absently allowed their tongues to dart into the corners of their mouths.

Their eyes were locked, their gazes hot, as they slowly drew away from each other. Amy couldn't believe it. All of that had been some kind of… foreplay.

Or something.

"Boys?"

They both turned their gazes to her. It was Rory who glanced back to the Doctor, and tilted his head at Amy, then started to move toward her across the pool.

Rory pulled Amy into his lap in the warm water, seating himself beneath her. He curled her into a ball in his lap, and the Doctor slid in beside Rory, pulling Amy's legs into his own lap, so that they were holding her between them.

_Is this actually okay?_ she found herself wondering wildly.

And was stunned speechless to hear _Rory's _voice inside her head. _Trust me. Trust us._

"Rory?" she blurted aloud, jerking back to regard both of them.

The Doctor was smiling reassuringly at her, though his split lip undermined the effect somewhat. But he looked - happy, kind of. Not freaked out, the way he usually seemed around her lately.

"I can let you touch one another's minds, when I'm touching you both," the Doctor told her gently. "Now shh… Rory knows what he's doing. Let him take the lead now, Amy."

_Relax, Amy_. Rory, in her head.

_Relax, Amy._ The Doctor.

So she curled into her boys, floating there in the warm water. Both of their hands soothed her, helped her to come back down from the adrenaline high of watching them wrestle. Watching them fighting, hurting each other.

Rory cradled her to his chest. "Amy… it's time for you to tell me what happened."

She exhaled, feeling the Doctor's hands on her calves, Rory's on her back. She didn't want to tell him. Didn't want to hurt him.

"I need to know, Amy," he told her. "If we're ever going to move on, I need to know. You would need the same, if it was the other way around."

She thought about that for a moment, knew that Rory was right. The Doctor wasn't interjecting anything, just waiting patiently beside Rory for Amy's answer.

She took a deep breath, snaked her hands around Rory's neck, kept her face buried against his chest. "We were trapped. In a closet. Cramped quarters. You know how it always is. Waiting them out. We needed the antibiotics for you!"

Rory listened silently, and the Doctor's hands stilled on her legs as she told the story. She knew that they were both feeling the full guilt of what they'd done.

There was a long pause before the next part, but Rory seemed to know that Amy was committed now. That it was just going to take a moment. "I convinced him by asking him to take me the one way that you've never wanted me," she whispered finally, her voice so soft that they both had to strain to hear her.

Both men tensed beneath her at the revelation. A long silence passed, during which both Amy and the Doctor waited for Rory's response.

"I see," he said finally, in a tight voice. "And he agreed to that? _That's_ what you meant when you said that he fucked you?" Rory glanced over at the Time Lord, whose couldn't quite seem to raise his eyes.

Yet it was from him that the affirmation came. "Yes, Rory. That's what she meant. That's what I did."

Rory's arms tightened around his wife and he exhaled angrily. "Yes, of course he did. Why should the intergalactic wag have any limits, eh? That's just Rory, so _human_ and _prudish_."

For the first time, he sounded truly, deeply bitter about what had happened. The Doctor put his arm around Rory's shoulders.

"That's not how I think of you," the Doctor said firmly. "I don't think it's prudishness, Rory." He seemed to be doing the thing that he occasionally did, where he suddenly became confident in his ability to navigate human emotions for a moment.

Rory tilted his head back, biting his lower lip in frustration. "How would you know? How would either of you even know?" Amy just clung to him from the circle of his arms, clearly not knowing how to make him feel better.

But was as surprised as Rory by the Doctor's response: "I know, Rory, because your mate Gaius went on to write about you in his elder years. The Last Centurion. The Sentry of the Pandorica. Did you think that no one that you knew ever told your stories?"

Amy looked up to see her husband also regarding the Time Lord, suddenly bemused. "He… he did? Gaius?"

The Doctor looked at Rory with open affection. "Of course he did. I never mentioned it to Amy… didn't think you'd necessarily want her to know the details. Never mentioned it to you, either, as I figured that you remembered what you got up to during those years, since you were there and all."

"He wrote about… everything?" Rory asked, his eyes glassy with some unknown emotion.

The Doctor shrugged. "I wouldn't know, as I couldn't know what he might have left out. But he was certainly open about the depth of his affection for you." He paused. "And of yours, for him."

Rory looked to Amy strangely, almost… apologetic. "I wish… I wish that you'd told me what you wanted, how badly you wanted that, before the Pandorica. Before it came to mean… something else, for me."

Infuriatingly, once again the Doctor somehow seemed to know what was going on. "Something else? What? Rory, were you… _raped_?"

He laughed loudly at that, the sound ringing off the stone walls of the bathhouse. The Doctor leaned in, then, toward Amy, his voice low. "Amy, for Rory, the way that you and I made love… that's how _men_ make love, to him. He wasn't disgusted with you. He didn't want to revisit… certain memories. Some of which might still be tender."

Amy finally pulled away from Rory's chest to look up at her husband full in the face. "Is that… true? Rory, did you have a lover? A _man_? While you waited for me?"

Rory peered down at her, his brow quirked in thoughtful amusement. "I… I had no idea he'd written of it, Amy. Most of the men I knew in those days couldn't even write, beyond the basics. Of course, Gaius was sort of a self-made scholar, always reading. I shouldn't be surprised."

She was blinking up at him. "You… are you just talking about… sex? Or was he…?"

He gave her a small smile. "It was not… just sex." Rory pulled Amy back into his chest, where he began to cradle her again, but this time more lovingly. "Gaius… I've never known another man like him. Well, that's not exactly true." With that, his sad eyes turned to the Doctor. "I've known _one_ other man like him."

The Doctor returned Rory's smile, reaching up to brush Rory's hair back from his temple with gentle fingers.

"I'm sorry if it's hard to hear this, Amy, but yes, I fell madly in love with him. Never saw it coming. We spent decades together, fighting and… being mates. He helped me protect the Pandorica, multiple times. In the end, I watched him die, in his wife's arms. I couldn't do a thing to stop it. I thought a lot, in those days, about what the Doctor's life has been like, all these centuries living only among shorter-lived species."

Amy found herself moved by the look of warm understanding exchanged between her boys in that moment. Was it possible that they were all in a Roman bathhouse, falling in love? Or something like it? Right after the Doctor and Rory had engaged in some sort of fist-fight or foreplay, it wasn't clear which.

And Rory had had a lover - some kind of warrior-husband, it sounded like - and had been so heartbroken at his loss that he couldn't bring himself to oblige Amy's desire to make love in the way that he and Gaius had.

"I think Gaius is a large part of the reason that I can't be angry with the Doctor for falling in love with you, Amy."

They were all three curled in on each other now, the Doctor with his arms around both his Ponds as Rory rocked Amy in the warm water. Her hair was a red swirl on its surface, brushing against all of their skin.

The Doctor spoke next, his words for Rory. "And what about Amy, Rory? Can you be angry at _her,_ for falling in love with _me_?"

Rory smiled again, gazing down at his wife's worried face in open adoration. "Of course not, Doctor. How could I be? I could never deny Amy anything. Nothing. Not even you, if that's what she wants." He turned his gaze back to the Doctor. "Every companion you have falls in love with you, don't they, Doctor? Each in our own way, maybe not all of us in a sexy way… but every single one of us does it. Who could resist... _you_?"

"Well," the Doctor responded with a quirked eyebrow, "Often, if you must know, the boyfriends can." He studied Rory, openly intrigued. "I admit, I didn't quite see this coming from you, Rory. And yet, now that I understand that Gaius… reminded you of _me…_ I suppose that it should have been obvious."

Rory exhaled slowly, half in relief, half in exasperation. "Well, there you go, Doctor. I've played out my upper hand, haven't I? Now you know the truth of why I can… wrap my brain, around the idea of you and Amy, together. You've let me take you down a notch, and you've even been a good sport about it, but now it's my heart that's been exposed, isn't it?"

The Doctor smiled at him, warmly. "It's quite a heart, Centurion." He drifted in, claiming Rory's mouth this time in a kiss where he took the lead, and Rory opened his mouth and softened beneath the kiss even as he cradled Amy in his arms. "I wish that I'd understood before today just how remarkable a heart you have, Rory. I thought I did understand, I really did, but I missed it. I wish I'd figured this out before I got it all wrong with Amelia."

"Hey. Boys," she said, reminding them of her presence. "I'm glad you're bonding and all, especially as it seems to be some kind of unexpectedly sexy bonding, but I am here, you know."

They both looked down at her, their three heads together creating a sort of cavern of warmth above the bubbly surface of the pool.

"Amy?" Strangely, they both spoke her name at once.

"Yes… _boys_?" she responded, taking in their suddenly intense gazes.

"We do remember that you're here, Amy," the Doctor told her softly. "It's just that, as I told you earlier, we needed some time to work some things out between us. And, as _Rory_ told you earlier, not everything is about you."

"But now, we've worked things out," Rory continued, as if picking up right where the Doctor left off, and she was starting to seriously wonder how at how astute they'd apparently already gotten at this telepathy thing with each other, which she was still kind of freaked out by. "We're on the same page, the Doctor and I. And now, as it turns out, some things _are_ still about you."

Rory's hand drifted to her breast, cupped it firmly, ran a thumb over her stiffening nipple. At the same time, one of the Doctor's hands began to stroke downward, inward, his fingers deftly stroking their way between her folds and into the slick heat of her body.

"We were wondering, Amelia," and of course this was the Doctor again, as Rory never called her that. "All of these years, madly in love with me since you were a child, madly in love with Rory almost as far back… have you ever fantasized about us both making love to you together?"

He was so old-fashioned, but his thumb was pressing firmly on her clit, two of his fingers pressing upward from deep inside of her body. Rory was now attending to both of her nipples, and Amy was nearly overwhelmed with the flurry of sensations.

"Have you ever wondered, Amy?" and Rory was teasing her mouth with his now, his voice barely audible to her though they both knew that the Doctor could hear him full well. "Have you ever made yourself come, imagining what it could feel like? To have both the Doctor and I inside of you, at the same time?"

Amy was moaning increasingly loudly in response to their questions, uncaring of who could hear, though Rory and the Doctor knew that they would not be interrupted. She was still floating, weightless as they touched her, supported on Rory's thighs. She tilted her head all the way back, arching in the water, the very picture of feminine desire. She knew that both of her boys were swollen with desire for her as well.

The Doctor's fingers were magic inside of her, pushing her quickly into her first orgasm as Rory obligingly leaned forward and sucked, hard, on one of her nipples. It was embarrassing, how quickly and hard she came in their laps, but neither of them seemed to even slow down in their onslaught.

It was the Doctor whispering in her ear now, nuzzling at her neck. "You made a deal with me, Amelia Pond. A deal that, as it turns out, I'm going to release you from. However, for one more hour… I'm going to take you again, Amy, like I did before, but this time Rory is going to be on the other side of you." They were pulling her from the pool now, and the three of them collapsed in a tangle of limbs there on the warm stone beside its edge.

"I should get you both back to the TARDIS," he grumbled under his breath, but Rory reached across Amy's body, gripped the Time Lord's shoulder, and caught his eye.

"No. Here. Now. Like this."

Amy groaned again, her hands searching, searching between her body and whomever was closest to her, trying to find one of her boys in order to get to the next part. Someone impatiently maneuvered her onto her side on the ground, and Rory slid in before her and another long, masculine body behind her, and she was suddenly being warmed between the two of them.

A hand from behind, large, strong, lifting her upper leg over Rory's.

_Let me go first, Ponds. _He was in their minds again. _It will be easier on Amy if I do._

And he did, sliding his erection between her thighs first, letting her natural slickness mingle with his own. At the same time, he pressed his thumb into her arse, giving her body the signal to start opening itself with that same fierce hunger that she had shown him when they were trapped in the closet.

She was still mad for it, her whole body winding tight like a spring the moment that he pressed inside of her. Rory had slid down her body, was suckling freely at both of her breasts, one hand tightly gripping her mons and the other her hip as he helped to hold her still for the Doctor.

He was touching her with the same impossible knowledge with which the Doctor did, the same perfect response to every craving of her body, the same shocking ability to coax her in the exact ways that pushed her further along the curve of desire at every moment. Amy wildly wondered if the Doctor could somehow extend his psychic abilities to his lovers. Rory had been making love to her for _years_, and he knew her body very well, but right now it was exactly as if he were reading her mind.

The Doctor's thumb slid free, and he pressed his cock into her in its place. As before, he entered her so smoothly, so in tune with the feedback of her body, so able to coax her with his hands and Rory's mouth. Everything felt so tightly wound inside of her that it was easy to let him press his way into her when the pressure itself felt so exquisite.

They paused, then, and he began to rock her with his body, slowly at first. Rory pulled her knee up high, hooking his hips under hers and began to to move against her with the same rhythm as the Doctor. They were rocking her between them, in perfect unison, and Amy felt Rory's familiar cock slowly nudging its way home into her, the passage so much tighter due to the Doctor already buried inside of her.

It was too much, the sensation was too much.

"Please, stop, give me a minute," she cried, burying her face against Rory's shoulder and sobbing.

The Doctor slowed his pace, reaching over and ruffling a hand into Rory's hair which lead to the Roman slowing down into a gentler counterpoint. It was rapidly becoming perfectly clear that the Doctor thought of using his psychic abilities as perfectly fair game once the activity at hand had gotten… intimate.

She'd have to ask him about it later. Right now she was too busy losing her mind, right here on this warm, moist stone floor. The Doctor and the Last Centurion, and the Girl Who Waited rocking gently between them, too full of them both to stay sane. Her boys were kissing each other over her shoulder - a benefit of the fact that she was enough shorter than them - then Rory broke that kiss to cover her own mouth with his, and she was shocked to realize that she could taste blood, and the Doctor, on Rory's mouth.

It was not a scenario that she would have ever believed possible, and yet it was happening, in a bathhouse in ancient Rome.

"My boys," she called to them from between them, and the Doctor whispered "My Ponds, my Amelia," against the back of her shoulder before he gently bit her there. Rory just kissed her, over and over and over, a little bit rougher than he ever had before.

Just the way that she sometimes wished he would.

The Doctor's hands slid over her ribs, cupping her breasts firmly as he thrust into her. Rory had brought both of his hands up to her face, holding her in place as he ravished her mouth, her knee hooked over his hip enough to keep him lodged in place in the cradle of her thighs. Amy began to gasp into Rory's mouth, her body beginning to hitch a bit in its rhythm.

"Shh," she heard the Doctor say, felt his fingers moving inside of her skull, and suddenly the orgasm that had been steadily approaching froze at its current distance, and Amy could no longer work toward it.

"What -" she tried to say, into Rory's mouth, but she heard the Doctor in her mind and somehow knew that Rory could as well.

_In such a hurry. Wait for Rory, dear. We all climax together, when I take us there. Soon._

So that was what had happened the first time. All that fancy Time Lord physiology somehow hijacked their human responses. Evidently Rory was not far behind her, and this time she felt it coming, felt the Doctor pull both her and Rory along into the rushing waters of his impending orgasm.

_Brace yourself, Rory,_ she thought as loudly as she could, opening her eyes and catching his gaze, and felt the Doctor chuckle against the back of her shoulder.

And then it happened, again, that incredible, mind-bending thing that had happened to her once before, in a closet, but this time Rory was here with her, and they were holding each other and the Doctor was holding them both as they all shuddered their way right into the time vortex with him and back.

It was no less disconcerting the second time, being drawn into the Doctor's world for that long moment of shared ecstasy flooding every synapse in all three brains. It was maddening, frightening, to know that this - parts of this, not the orgasm itself, but the rest - were what he lived with in his mind every moment of his life. The awareness of the time vortex swirling within his own timeline as he lived out the days of his life.

Their timelines, tangled with his now, dancing, vibrantly, playfully. As humans, they were rarely aware of their own timelines, but for the moment, theirs were electrified by the temporal energy of a Time Lord's, and the three jumped between their bodies, sparking repeatedly.

It was intense business, sex with an alien.

They washed back out of his world in waves… she was surprised that she hadn't noticed it the first time, but then she'd been awfully distracted by bucketloads of guilt and angst, she supposed. The effect was surreal, the overlay of his hyperactive Time Lord senses, always with the rushing of the vortex at its edges, far too much for their brains to actually process and yet for an instant they were in it with him, and then it receded and they had only their own senses again for a moment before the next, shallower wave washed back over them.

It seemed like a long time before they washed fully free of him, and she found herself wondering idly if he could keep them there if he wanted to.

"It's not good for your mind, to spend too much time there," he murmured against her shoulder. "A few minutes is safe. Much more… isn't."

Amy opened her eyes and found herself nose to nose with her husband. They were all shifting now, their bodies falling out of alignment, shivering against the moist stones.

"Back in the pool, you lot, to warm up," ordered the Doctor abruptly. "Then it's back to the TARDIS, to take proper showers and then a bite to eat. I know how to care for my humans, and it's not laying about on wet stone floors, no matter how indulgent the afterglow."

"So… that's it?" Amy questioned, still sort of woozy with the aftermath of the whole alien orgasm thing as she slid into the water. "You split the Doctor's lip, he gives you a black eye, we all hug and make up, you confess to your lost love, and you both shag me senseless on the floor? And then everything's okay between all of us, and now we're some kind of… what are we? What do you call this?"

Rory and the Doctor exchanged a rueful glance at Amy's description of events as they slid into the pool beside her. "Family, Amelia," the Doctor answered, giving her a gentle tap on the nose. "It's called family."

* * *

_Epilogue_

And time, or something like it, continued to pass.

It was an odd arrangement that the three inhabitants of the TARDIS had come to. Given that it was the Doctor and Amy who had started the whole thing, it made a strange sort of sense that Rory taking charge of the affair brought it a certain balance. Amy never would have guessed that the Doctor had a submissive streak that Rory was somehow able to tap, and Amy's main role seemed to be to turn both of her boys on so wildly that everyone lost control of themselves once in a while.

It certainly remained true that Amy and Rory behaved like a married couple - well, however a time-traveling, galaxy-saving married couple was supposed to behave. They shared a room, slept in it together every night. The Doctor didn't even share their sleep cycle - he simply passed out for a longish nap every couple of days, at fairly unpredictable intervals - and as far as they could tell, he didn't have a bedroom. So he didn't exactly intersect with their daily routines any more than he ever had, with the exception that sometimes his bi-weekly nap struck him during a post-coital haze, and so randomly it began to occur in their bed.

The sex wasn't frequent, which turned out to be kind of a good thing, as it continued to be rather explosive and sometimes crossed the line into downright violent when the Doctor was in a dark mood and Rory was feeling inclined. Amy for some strange reason found this arousing and it tended to lead into lengthy bouts of rough three-way sex. She never would have guessed that the sometimes shy Doctor would be given to such roughhousing, but then it was clear that the thrill of giving his partner exactly what they wanted was an intrinsic part of Time Lord sexuality, and Amy and Rory had always been pretty rowdy in bed.

It wasn't the sort of thing that one wanted to be doing every day.

As all of their friendships had been so romantic from the very early days - even the Doctor and Rory's, in its way, bonded in their consuming love of the same girl - the sudden addition of occasional sex to their repertoire turned out to feel less strange than any of them might have expected. Once in a while, it happened. The Doctor and Amy went back to behaving as they had in the early years, before things between them began to strain.

The fact that Rory and the Doctor both shared a taste for violence with another man gave them a need that they could only meet with one another, and their deep respect and affection turned into an iron bond that had nothing to do with Amy. But they also shared a delight in overwhelming Amy with their attentions, and Rory showed an unusual aptitude for sharing the Doctor's super-human abilities. Rory had always been by far the most empathic of the triad, and his years of waiting had honed it to a razor's edge. He also turned out to be the most emotionally mature being in the room, and kept them all on track with a surprisingly deft hand whenever Amy's tempestuousness or the Doctor's alienness threatened to derail their happy family.

Of course there was no word to describe the Doctor's new place in their life, but then, had there ever been, from the first day? 'Alien time-traveling best-friend and love object' was such a mouthful. He was the _Doctor_. And he continued to introduce them as his Ponds at every opportunity, but that was nothing new either. Perhaps his eyes sparkled a bit more now when he said it.

And time, or something like it, continued to pass.

* * *

_A/N again: Acknowledgments are in order. Always first and foremost, to my muse Maria, who is currently slogging her way (happily!) through seven seasons of DW just so she can share in my new fandom, now that I'm back to writing fic after many years away._

_This story was inspired by one of the most amazing pieces of fic I've ever read, Roman Holiday (and its sequels, Jewel of the Nile and Last Tango in Paris) by Anna. (These stories are from the Harry Potter fandom, Severus Snape and Hermione Granger ship.) I love love love the very long-term attraction between two people who can't be together. Though I don't have the patience or perseverance to write hundreds of thousands of words in order to get there, this is my take on folding that into a 11/Amy/Rory threesome, my current favorite ship. Anna's writing is I think a true example of how occasionally fic can take cannon to a more sophisticated place, and the reason that I personally fell in love with the masses of Palestrina. You can still find Anna's work by searching for La Société des Femmes Dangereuses, the archive that houses it._


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